But then, Noah was, first and always, a businessman.
His silent appraisal of her gave Jasmine hope. Her breath ballooned up in her chest, crushing her lungs as she waited for his reply.
“You think someone will buy you,” he finally said, a greedy glint in his eye. She had caught his interest, she realized, a shaky relief filling her inside out.
“Yes,” she said, putting all her confidence in that single word. “Give me a week, Noah, please,” she added, desperation coating her throat.
“Three days,” Noah finally said.
A shake of his head had one of his thugs accompanying Jasmine to the room she had been brought to earlier.
For a second, Jasmine shook violently from head to toe, utter fear drenching her.
No, she couldn’t lose her nerve now.
Switching her prepaid cell phone on, Jasmine clicked the number she had memorized years ago on the clunky keys, every breath coming like a chore. It had been years; he wouldn’t probably have the same number anymore.
Even if he did have it, he might not care.
Pressing the cold phone to her forehead, Jasmine held back the hot sting of tears.
This had to work.
She backspaced a few times as her fingers shook on the phone screen. Her stomach tight, her hands clammy, she hit Send and crumpled against the floor.
In the process of putting his discarded shirt on, Dmitri Karegas flicked a glance toward the blonde provocatively stretched over his bed.
“Come back to bed,” she whispered without any fabricated coyness.
What was her name? Mandy? Maddie?
For the life of him, Dmitri couldn’t remember such a simple thing. And couldn’t manage any shame over it, either.
Work, party, sex—these were the parameters of his life. He didn’t hate women, didn’t remember deciding to make his life so. But there it was.
He had worked around the clock for the past two months, trying to undo the damage his business partner and oldest friend, Stavros, had wreaked on Katrakis Textiles’ stock with his uncharacteristic behavior, and finalizing a coup that had finally landed a nightclub he had been dying to acquire on his portfolio.
So he had found the blonde at the nightclub on his first night looking over his new toy.
She was everything he liked in a woman—willing, wanton, with a wicked tongue to boot. Even better, she didn’t fill the silence with inane chatter and hadn’t even dropped those usual hints about a budding relationship.
One creamy thigh bared as she slid upward in the bed. Yet as her rose-colored nipples puckered into tight buds under his continued stare, all he felt was an echo of arousal, the way a dog would lift its muzzle at the scent of meat.
Nothing else. Just like the numerous times over the past decade.
He worked, he collected his toys, he slept with willing women, yet somehow Dmitri never felt anything but a surface reaction, as if he was skimming through the very edge of life, incapable of sinking beneath the surface, forever on the outsides of it.
As if what he had turned off all those years ago to live through another day could never be turned on again. Even when he had helped Anya, who had become a sort of a friend, it had been a shallow echo of a different reality, another life where he had saved his mother that night.
Laughter, gravelly and as shocking as if a mountain rose in the midst of the sea, reached his ears, cutting off his unnerving reverie.
It was the afternoon that Leah had invited Stavros and herself to lunch aboard his yacht.
Looking around, he found his jeans and pulled them on.
He had always liked his godfather’s granddaughter. But ever since Leah and Stavros had found their way to each other, which he had been damn glad about because all the drama around their marriage had caused the Katrakis Textiles’ stock to sink, he had begun finding it distinctly uneasy to be in their company.
He knew what the source of that unease was but he was damned if he gave it voice. Neither did he feel up to the disapproving glance that would come from Stavros.
Even though he was only older by three years, Stavros treated him as if Dmitri was still the sixteen-year-old thug that their godfather Giannis had brought to his estate.
“Leave as soon as you can,” he told the woman without meeting her gaze.
As soon as he stepped on the upper deck, Leah pulled away from Stavros and gave him a loose hug. “It’s good to see you, Dmitri.”
The familiar warmth of her slender body chased a sudden shiver through him, as shocking as if a cavern of emotion had opened up amongst the emptiness. Something must have flickered in his face because Stavros studied him closely.
Ever since Stavros had accepted that he was in love with Leah, after years of scorning Dmitri for what he called his reckless, hedonistic lifestyle, Stavros knew how empty Dmitri felt inside.
“I liked you better before,” he said roughly, warning Stavros away.
Leah looked between them, frowning. “What?”
“Nothing,” Stavros delivered in a flat tone. The knot of his gut relented a little and Dmitri breathed easy, slipping into the mode of that reckless playboy that was bone-deep now.
He pulled a chair for Leah and signaled to his staff to serve lunch. Pulling on a practiced smile, he looked at Leah. “So what has prompted you two to emerge from your love nest a week before the wedding?”
Leah sighed. “I would like for you to give me away at the wedding. Giannis is not here and you mean a lot to me, Dmitri.”
“How many more times do I have to give you away?” he teased while intensely glad that she had asked him.
Her gaze twinkling, Leah grabbed Stavros’s hand and laced her fingers through his. “Just this one more time.”
After years of shouldering duty and knowing nothing but rules, Stavros had finally found a measure of happiness with Leah.
Holding Stavros’s gaze, because he would die rather than betray anything else that he might be feeling to his friend, Dmitri said, “It will be my pleasure, Leah.”
The sharp chime of his cell phone drew his attention. Frowning at the strange number, he clicked it.
I need help, Dmitri. Call Noah and find out. Do this for Andrew.
A cold nail raking over his spine, Dmitri stared at the message.
Images and sensations—his father’s drunken rages, his mother’s tired face, his own powerlessness, stinking alleys filled with Dumpsters, fistfights and broken noses, sobbing when Andrew held him hard, and a girl with huge, dark eyes in her oval face...
Jasmine...
Christos, the message is from Jasmine.
His gut clenched so hard that he pushed at the table and stood with a growl, a violence of emotion he hadn’t known in years holding him in its feral grip.
Noah... Noah King... The man who ruled over the lowlifes of London like a king ran his empire... Lending and extortion, bars and nightclubs, pimps and prostitution, there was no pie that Noah didn’t have a finger in.
And Jasmine was caught in it.
A soft hand on his arm brought him back from the pounding fury... He turned to see Leah staring at him with such shock that his breath burst into him in a wild rush.
On his other side stood Stavros, his gaze filled with concern. “Dmitri, who was that text from?”
“Jasmine.” Even saying her name sent a pulse of something through Dmitri. As if he was opening a door he had closed on the worst night of his life. As if he was suddenly a spiraling vortex of emotion instead of empty inside.
“Jasmine, as in Andrew’s sister?” Stavros’s understanding was instant.
“Yes, she is in trouble,” he replied, running his hand through his hair.
His muscles pumped with the need for action; he wanted to smash something, he...
“Dmitri, let’s discuss what needs to be done,” Stavros interjected calmly, as if aware of how raw he felt. Of course, his friend knew.
He opened the message and read it again. He had thought Jasmine better off without his interest and instead, she had been right there in that veritable hell all these years.
How? How was Jasmine in trouble with Noah King? What had Andrew done?
Instructing Stavros to wait, he made a series of calls, pulling every contact he had made during his life on the streets of London.
In twenty minutes, he had the gist of the situation, and it sent his sanity reeling.
Noah King had set Jasmine’s virginity up for an auction and she was texting for help.
If he hadn’t spent the first fifteen years of his life in that pit, he wouldn’t have believed it. The thing that burned him, though, was that she didn’t ask for help. Not even now.
Instead, she’d reminded him that he owed Andrew for the countless times he had saved Dmitri from his alcoholic father’s rages and then from any number of fistfights that could have killed him.
Did she think he wouldn’t come unless it was to pay off a debt?
Shoving away the infernal questions, he turned to Stavros. “I...need as much cash as we can drum up instantly, upward of a hundred thousand pounds at least.”
Stavros didn’t even hesitate before he called their accountant. “Anything else?” he asked after he had finished.
“You’re the only one I trust. If this goes sideways, I want you to...take care of Jasmine.”
Stavros didn’t even try to stop him, only nodded. He had taught Dmitri what it meant to do his duty.
Maybe this was his chance to start afresh. Maybe he would have his own freedom from the guilt and emptiness that had plagued him for more than a decade once he’d set Jasmine free.
Jasmine was startled awake from a fitful sleep by the soft creaking of the door. Adrenaline deluged her and she choked down on the scream building in her chest. Slowly, she reached for the knife and sat up toward the edge of the bed. She wasn’t going to leave her safety to chance.